


An A-Z Of the End of the World

by historymiss



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Five is a sentimental drunk sometimes - Freeform, Gen, I love my 58 year old teenaged son, Yes I stole a joke from Avatar, this is my emotional support mannequin - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 19:34:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 7,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17873495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: An alphabet of drabbles exploring everyone’s favourite cranky middle aged teen, updated daily or as close to it as I can manage.





	1. A is for Academy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You ever wonder,” Five slurs, Dolores clutched safely to his chest, “Why dad called it an academy?”

“You ever wonder,” Five slurs, Dolores clutched safely to his chest, “Why dad called it an academy?”

“No.” Diego is still three or four strides ahead, still flexing his fingers one-two-three-four, a kid’s habit that Five still finds strange to see written large. 

“Cause we learned things.” Luther rumbles, and Five grins beatifically, patting his older-younger brother on one massive pectoral. He doesn’t even pretend not to be amused by Luther’s flinch.

“Oh no no no, what did we learn though? Only stuff that would help us with the mission, right? I got quantum physics and Diego here learned trig, Allison had her psychology lessons and you... hit things...” Five adjusts Dolores so she’s more comfortable. She likes to see where she’s going. “We never really learned anything useful.”

“Why do you fucking care?” Diego half-looks back over his shoulder.

“Had a lot of time to think this out, back in the apocalypse.” Five hates the way his voice cracks a little at the end there. He hates the way his voice sounds full stop, high and reedy and weird echoing in his skull. “And what bigger tangle than the good old Umbrella Academy?”

“So what’s your theory, Five?” Luther is starting to look uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than usual. When did Number One get so uneasy in his own skin?

“Well, Umbrella Child Paramilitary Corps wouldn’t fit on the badges,” Five lays his head back and looks at the sky. He can’t see the stars. Too much light pollution, here. Too much life. He’s missed those empty skies.

“But I think it’s because he didn’t want us to be a family.”

“No shit.” Diego grumbles, and Five shoots him a Look. 

“Just gives me warmth that the old bastard failed, is all. Look at us. Look how fucked up we are.” Five gestures, just wide enough to avoid dropping Dolores. “We’re a family after all.”


	2. B is for Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘He finds he’d kill someone quite significant to get his moustache back’

Five isn’t stupid. He knows that he’s broken. They all are, to greater or lesser degrees. At least some of his damage is unique: forty years in the apocalypse with only a mannequin for company is a pretty individual complaint, and he takes a certain amount of weary pride in that.

It’s why his current situation irritates him so much. Thirteen year old Five bears none of the scars that he thinks of more as cracks, scratches and scuffs from a lifetime of fighting to get back home. The child that follows him in mirrors and glass is a stranger.

It’s the face that gets him. The face and the height. That pale, youthful face and neat black hair make a mockery of who Five has become. He finds he’d kill someone quite significant to get his moustache back, for a start. And it would be a blessing to actually be able to look other adults in the eye. More than anything, though, he just wants to be believed. Turn up with the wear and tear of four decades of struggle and maybe Vanya wouldn’t have looked at him with pity and sent him to bed. Maybe he wouldn’t be sitting in a van, alone save for Dolores, trying to stop the end of the world in short pants and knee socks, for God’s sake.

Instead Five had turned up in the same body he’d left in, with hands that had never buried his family or fitted to the stock of a rifle, raised in service of people he didn’t trust.

Dad had told him he’d plunge into the ice of the timestream come out as an acorn. Five just hadn’t realised the metaphor would be so very depressingly literal.


	3. C is for Costume

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five prefers the classic look.

“Nice costume.” 

Five looks up from tying his bowling shoes, mouth already forming a snarl. His patience is being severely tested right now and the last thing he needs is non apolcalypse related distractions.

The other speaker is a teenaged boy, unruly hair, thick rimmed glasses. He gestures to the badge on Five’s blazer.

“It’s like, retro yeah? I prefer the classic look too, those jumpsuits looked so dumb.”

Five finds himself, unusually, at a loss for words. Dad had never really encouraged fan interaction. You never knew what might get blurted out. 

“Oh, he’s a huge fan of the early Umbrella Academy.” Klaus, damn him, has finished tying his own shoes and apparently wants to get involved. Wonderful. “Can’t talk about anything else.”

The teen nods, as if this somehow makes sense. “You in town for an event?”

“... you could say that.” A muscle in Five’s cheek twitches, quite contrary to his bidding.

“Event of a lifetime.” Adds Klaus, darkly.

“Cool. Well, good luck or whatever.” The boy turns to go, then half-turns back. “Oh and, uh, you might wanna move your badge. It’s on the wrong side.”

Five can hear Klaus cracking up. If they get through this, he’s finding a new wardrobe.


	4. D is for Dolores (of course)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Men usually date women who remind them of their mothers.

Dolores doesn’t let him give up. 

Five would rather die than admit it to anyone, least of all himself, but there are times when he wants to just stop fighting. To lie down amid the ruins of the world and let the apocalypse, finally, claim him.

She doesn’t let him get away with that.

Dolores is exacting, persistent, as acerbic as Five himself (he gives her all the best lines). In the right light, her carefully blank expression looks vaguely sardonic, as if she knows the answers to all Five’s questions but, for the sake of her own amusement, wants him to work them out himself.

(In this, she reminds him of Grace. It seems the adage about men dating women who remind them of their mothers is true)

Sometimes, when the stars are too close and the sky too large, Five spends nights curled under the beckoning angle of her arm, waking with kinks in his neck from the hard angles of her body. Waking in the morning mist, he pats her cheek and presses his face briefly to the pinpoint cold of her fingers.

He wouldn’t be alive, or at least sane (relatively) if not for her. 

Five hates the Commission for many reasons, but leaving the original Dolores at the end of the world alone is the first on the list. She urged him to go, of course, but still... 

It’s her name he thinks of when he blows the damn place up.


	5. E is for Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They all have escape plans.

All of them have escape plans. Except maybe Luther. Five is pretty sure Number One will stay with the old man until one of them croaks or the house falls down around his ears, whichever comes first. 

The rest of them, though- they have dreams. Visions of the future outside of the Academy, strategies for that mythical moment when they turn eighteen or get enough money or just decide they’ve had enough.

Even Vanya has an escape route. She must have, the way she plays her violin with single-minded devotion unti it transports her almost entirely, eyes unfocused, to anther place. Her fingers may be bloody and raw, but Five knows that Vanya has in her hands her ticket out.

As for him, once he’s mastered time travel he’s gone. Five can feel it, now, when he jumps. It’s like a magnetism in his bones, a longing to push himself further than he’s ever been. To prove what he can do and that there’s nowhere Dad can touch him.

It’s so close now he can taste it.

One more jump.

Then he’ll be free.


	6. F is for Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five chooses his own name, and I address something about Vanya’s.

It doesn’t escape notice that Five is the only one without a name. The answer, for once, is very simple.

They’re named when they’re very young: six, maybe. Or perhaps that’s too old to receive a name. Five hardly has any basis for comparison. Grace and Pogo push for it despite its apparent lack of utility to Reginald Hargreeves. Names, Pogo points out, cleaning his glasses delicately on his fur and hating himself for the idea even as he suggests it, have a certain psychological value. The children will be happier to be more than a number.

Grace is tasked with the problem, as she is with all things involving basic humanity, the concept gaving eluded Hargreeves for many years as far as Five can tell. She gives them names that reflect their origins, a sentimental touch that Diego and Allison will later appreciate and Klaus will not. 

(She doesn’t get it quite right. Vanya is a diminutive of Ivan. Number Seven finds this out later, but she keeps the name anyway, a defective moniker for a defective child)

However, Five is a foundling, from the same city they now live in. An orphan, apparently. He cost Hargreeves nothing to acquire, and has no origin to speak of.

“What name would you like, dear?” Grace asks, as sincere and loving as any perfectly programmed mother. Five shrugs. Names have never struck him as especially important.

“I don’t mind Number Five. I’ll keep it until I think of something better.”


	7. G is for Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because Five isn't dead doesn't mean there isn't a ghost for Klaus to see.

In the weeks after Five left, they all feel like their lives are- not exactly on hold, but close to it. Like they're waiting for him to come back, triumphant or chastened or maybe even pretending that nothing had happened. Hargreeves descends into curt, thin-lipped worry, and Pogo takes to looking out of the windows when he's not busy assisting his master. The worst thing about the atmosphere in the house is that it all seems, somehow, inevitable. As if the Academy was building to something like this from the moment those seven shiny beetle-black prams wheeled their way into the house. 

Or so it seems to Klaus, anyway. He's habitually morbid, Hargreeves has told him often enough, and where Diego and Luther refuse to talk about Five ("He was showing off again, he'll come back soon enough."), Vanya is a law unto herself, as always, Ben only wants to talk about it briefly before words aren't big enough, and Allison confines her crying to her room, Klaus wants to unpack and explore this loss. It's different to the one he knows. There's no spectral Five screaming at him from beyond the grave, no insubstantial fingers brushing at his arm, trying to grab and direct him. Number Five, he's pretty sure, is still alive but unable to be contacted or to return, and for Klaus, who has spent his whole life surrounded by people who will _never leave_ , the idea is unthinkable. 

It's rather refreshing, honestly, and Klaus finds himself oddly grateful to Five for that.

That doesn't mean there's no ghost, however.

At night, when Klaus sneaks out of bed and lays his forehead on the cool glass of his window, blurring his eyes so that the ghosts that surround him and the lights of the city beyond are one and the same, he can see another boy. The same pale blue pyjamas, dark hair, and narrow face. 

"How did you get out?" Klaus whispers, touching his hand to the glass so that the other boy does the same. "Where are you?"

Five never responds. Klaus exhales, and the ghost of his brother vanishes in the haze of mist. He draws an X through it with the tip of a finger, swiftly, as if severing something. His lip curls.

"Why didn't you take us, too?"


	8. H is for Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mansion still smells the same. That's what gets to him. Forty years in the literal wilderness and when he returns, the Academy still has the same dust-and-furniture polish smell, with a faint tang of old dinners and something undefinable, a slightly acrid, chemical quality that he always figured was Mom, or maybe some of Dad's more esoteric experiments.
> 
> Anyway, it's fucking creepy.

The mansion still smells the same. That's what gets to him. Forty years in the literal wilderness and when he returns, the Academy still has the same dust-and-furniture polish smell, with a faint tang of old dinners and something undefinable, a slightly acrid, chemical quality that he always figured was Mom, or maybe some of Dad's more esoteric experiments.

Anyway, it's fucking creepy.

Standing here, in his room, it'd be easy to let go of the last four decades and just fall back into who he was when he left. The body is the same, after all. The outfit, too. The room is kept exactly as it was, a streak of sentimentality that Five assumes must have been Pogo's, or Mom's. He's honestly surprised that Hargreeves didn't try to replace him. Maybe it would have been harder to start over again with one of the other kids, the ones he can't help but think of as lucky. The ones who weren't sold. The only indication that Five ever left is the clothes he was wearing when he came through in the courtyard, too big now and slightly damp. Long habits of living alone have forced Five to fold them and leave them on the bed. That's new too, though Five himself hasn't noticed.

He looks up, at the boxes above the wardrobe, the notebooks full of temporal equations that he knows are hidden among the spare shoes and warm hats. How useless all that secrecy seems, now. How stupidly _young_ that impulse.

How long did he spend, standing in front of these walls and their disquieting, dingy shade of green, making shorter and shorter jumps, refining his sense of space and time until he could feel his way between the cracks of the world and into the timestream? How often had Five run his fingers along the posters, conveniently at little kid height, showing the best way to gouge and strike and incapacitate your opponent?

How often had he dreamed of returning here, in his secret heart– back to a place that, while as horrible and tough as the apocalypse and, later, the Commission, at least held the comfort of the terrors being familiar?

Five shakes his head, trying to dislodge the ghosts and the dust. He reminds himself he's luckier than the kids: Vanya, Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus. Five has been away from this place for forty years, but when he looks at his siblings, it's obvious to Five that, though they may have drifted apart, none of them truly left.


	9. I is for Insight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course Vanya wrote a book.

Of course Vanya wrote a book.

Five is startled, at first, to see his sister peering out at him from under the rubble that used to be a library. Stooping, he uncovers the cover and lets out a short laugh that has only the barest trace of humour in it. _Extra-Ordinary_. Well, he hadn't really known Vanya to be the jokester of the family.

The book itself doesn't reveal much, at least not in the early pages. Birth, adoption, the extraordinary abilities flowering in each of the siblings except her. The tears that followed, and the training that Hargreeves forced on them all. Five knows all this already, and he flicks through it impatiently. She has a remarkable memory for detail, he'll give her that: there's the time Klaus broke his jaw, Diego overcoming his stutter, more minor descriptions of Hargreeves' reactions when they were training, the exacting study of his moods that comes from the ever-present terror of living under the thumb a man who found you useful but never loved you.

Five is mildly aggrieved that he doesn't get more of a mention before he disappears. Then again, _Extra-Ordinary_ is more of an exorcism than a recollection, and there's not much to confess in their shared midnight snacks, the way they'd eat peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches and out the world to rights.

(He didn't realise how much his disappearance had gutted her. That section, he skips.)

It's what comes later that offers the real meat. How Ben's monsters devoured him whole, something Five reads with sadness but not much surprise. It had only been a matter of time. How that second loss had caused the team to drift apart, finally, the bonds formed in childhood stretched to breaking point as they all became adults. he finds himself envious. What he'd give, to be able to grow into that kind of selfishness. 

Most of all, Vanya's book teaches Five that he can't rely on his brothers and sisters when he goes back to the past. They've become mired in their own struggles, tangled in the trap that Hargreeves made for them all unknowing. The training, it seemed, has failed. He'll have to save his family- and the world- on his own.


	10. F is for Floss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay look I had a real hard time thinking of J and then I saw this https://www.instagram.com/p/BuhV1dnF_u2/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=cpkyzndz4imv and I AM ONLY HUMAN.

Five squints.

He’s done things none of them would believe. Hurtled through space and time at his own whim, survived alone for four decades, solved equations that would melt a lesser man’s brain with nothing but chalk. The blood of four dictators is on his hands.

This, however: this is his greatest challenge yet.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s all in the switch.” Diego explains again, moving his hips in and out in a frankly disquieting fashion. “In, switch, out, switch.”

Five attempts to emulate, moving his own waist jerkily backwards and forwards. Allison gyrates alongside him with rather more success. After a moment he gives up. Humans just aren’t supposed to _move_ that way, and besides, his face is uncomfortably warm for some reason.

Diego’s looking at him with equal parts pity and amusement.

“What.” Five readjusts his jacket bitterly. 

“My god.” Diego shakes his head. “You really are fifty-eight.”


	11. K is for Klaus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His little brother stinks of time travel and trauma. But this is why Five came back, right? 
> 
> To save them?

Perhaps they should have been closer. Five isn’t really given to this kind of sentimentality, not very often, but sometimes he wonders. After all, Klaus is Number Four. 

Maybe they should have had a rivalry, like Luther and Diego.

God, the thought makes him tired.

What matters now is that his younger brother is sitting in his room and he stinks of time travel. The cheap and nasty Commission kind, that leaves a sickness in your stomach. The tattoo and the vest speak indelibly of Hanoi, and of course Klaus isn’t doing anything to try and hide it.

Five exhales, puts his hands in his pockets. This isn’t his business.

But that’s why he came back, right? 

To save them?

As he leaves Dolores reminds him, softly, not to be an ass. 

It’s the one thing Five has never been good at.


	12. L is for Legend

Five is somewhat used to being a celebrity. The money required to keep and train six children was quite substantial and Hargreeves was a canny if idiosyncratic advertiser. Five grew up with his face on lunchboxes and cereal.

Still, it’s another thing entirely to be a legend at the Commission. 

He finds the idea that they were watching him survive from here unexpectedly bitter. Yes, most of them were rooting for him, but the thought of the Handler chewing on time-period candy and enjoying the spectacle of him surviving, alone, decade after decade... 

It’s obscene. And not just because of his wounded pride.

Five is a celebrity, sure. But he thinks the Comission has forgotten that this world isn’t just a show.


	13. M is for Mom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to Grace, who will get her own fic from me one day.

Five is a little past four years old when he meets the woman he will call ‘mom’ for the rest of his life. It’s a little later than most, but it’s not like any of them have anything to compare it to. Not yet, anyway.

The children meet her in a group, except for Number Seven, who is sick. Number Seven is sick a lot- Five suspects that it might be her super power. He’s not sure how that’s going to be useful fighting crime, but Number Four can talk to the dead and Dad wants that, so there must be some kind of plan.

Anyway. The lady in front of them is tall and blonde, with glassy, bright eyes like marbles and a friendly red smile. Her hands are neatly clasped in front of her, and her skirt is a perfect circle around her knees.

“Hello, children.” She smiles even wider, and Five frowns a little. Even then, he didn’t like it when people smiled at him. “I’m your mother.”

“No you’re not.” Five raises an eyebrow, a gesture he’s learned from Dad. The smile stays fixed.

“I will be from now on.” She winks at him. Five feels vaguely insulted, deep in his four year old heart. Number Two hisses an almost inaudible _yessss_.

“Are you marrying Dad?” Number One asks, carefully, like he’s solving a puzzle. 

A smooth shake of the head.

“I’m just your mom, darling.” She kneels and opens her arms. “And I’m so happy to meet you all.”


	14. N is for Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five's first job with the Commission takes him to 1950s America, and it is the closest to weeping he has come since he was thirteen, kneeling in front of the ruins of his home.

Five's first job with the Commission takes him to 1950s America, and it is the closest to weeping he has come since he was thirteen, kneeling in front of the ruins of his home. Coming out of the jump, he has to squeeze his eyes shut, take deep breaths, anything to stop his heart from hammering and sweat soaking the back of his shirt, the first nice (or at least vaguely smart) clothes he's had in over four decades.

That's what taking lungfuls of air not soaked in dust does to him. Or standing under a sky that's still blue, and not the angry reddish-gray he's grown used to. It's almost stupid, the deep, clear color scattered with perfect little cartoon clouds. Five dreamed about skies like this, a long time ago. When he was still a child. And, just at the moment he thinks he can bear it, he hears- other people. Laughter, even. Not tricks on the edge of hearing, or something his brain has filled in to stop him going mad. Actual, honest to God humans, living and talking and going about their day. It's the harshest, most jarring, most beautiful sound Five has ever heard, and it sets him off all over again.

Part of him aches with the desire to warn them. To run down the street screaming, Commission be damned. But that is what his training was for, both from his father and this mysterious comic-book assemblage of weirdoes he now works for. Focus on the mission, and not what your heart wants to do. 

Slowly, he gets his breathing under control and tightens his hand on the handle of the briefcase the Handler gave him. It wouldn't do to have a panic attack in the middle of the 1950s, especially not on his first mission. It isn't _professional_. 

Five straightens his tie and smooths his mustache down. 

Just a few more steps in the plan. He's dealt with worse than normal in his life.


	15. O is for Orchestra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Five could ever admit he was wrong, now would be the time.
> 
> He won't, of course. And it's not like there's much of an opportunity, what with Vanya ripping apart half the theatre in her white-hot anger. Still. Perhaps it'd go some way towards mending things. Or maybe it wouldn't.

If Five could ever admit he was wrong, now would be the time.

He won't, of course. And it's not like there's much of an opportunity, what with Vanya ripping apart half the theatre in her white-hot anger. Still. Perhaps it'd go some way towards mending things. Or maybe it wouldn't.

The initial cracks, after all, were inflicted a long time ago. He ducks as a piece of plush seating whips over his head, lashed to pieces by the white-cold energy coming from his sister. Did he even know she was in an orchestra?

Of course he didn't. Stupid, sloppy Five (his ego doesn't allow him to say). Still doesn't look before he leaps. Too fixed on preventing the future he couldn't look at the present. See the drab little cocoon of an apartment Vanya had made for herself, the way she held her shoulders in a permanent downward stoop, and recognise her uneasy stillness for the ticking time bomb it was. Maybe if she'd been some random _butcher, _he'd have been interested in her life. In how the small details of her existence, and absence, would affect the world.__

__And now it's too late. Vanya is tearing herself and the whole world apart. Luther is having some sort of hard-edged breakdown (he obviously thinks nobody can tell), Klaus is... a new and different flavour of Klaus, and that's always going to be tricky, and Allison can't talk. Diego _seems_ fine, but it's the kind of brittle sanity that's stretched thin over a yawning chasm. And Five knows, now, that he can't assume anything about his siblings._ _

__God, what a mess._ _

__What a wasted opportunity._ _


	16. P is for Professional

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just Hazel's luck: he finally gets to meet the legendary Number Five, and he's a goddamn kid.

The Commission prizes professionalism above all over things. It's among the first principles of their training, and it's certainly been reinforced for Hazel in their choice of partner for him. Cha-Cha is professionalism made human, from the severe haircut to the clicking directness of her walk, always predatory, always purposeful. Like she's offsetting the frivolousness of her name. Hazel has thought about asking, but it might be a sore spot, and anyway, Cha-Cha isn't that interested in personal history. The closest they ever got was a mission to some big, old-timey city, Hazel doesn't remember the specifics any more, and she had tilted her head slightly to the music flooding from a nearby alley, something like a smile on her lips. 

That's as much as he's ever gotten from her.

Hazel had expected Five to be the same, honestly. The man is, after all, a legend. The Commission had given him nothing more than a time-travel briefcase and an old rifle and set him loose in history, and the old hermit had racked up kill after kill, a roster of successful missions that became, very quickly, the yardstick they were all compared to. Nobody says outright _why can't you be more like Number Five_ , of course, but the implication's there. Five gets his missions finished faster, quieter, more elegantly. Hazel and Cha-Cha? They're more like a wrecking ball. Or a bomb. Five operates like a surgeon, excising errors from history with minimal fuss.

Cha-Cha had been almost giddy when they got the assignment. Hazel knows she has kind of a stern respect thing for Five. She gets like that about people she really wants to kill. As for Hazel? Well, it's kind of a shame Five has to die, but it'll be cool to meet the guy in person. Maybe ask him about a few of his jobs before he goes. There's time, when you have the clamps on. The battery takes a while to warm up.

So, when they meet him, finally, face to face, when they realise that a, the legendary Number Five is now a kid (and Hazel is, honestly, kind of squeamish about that, never mind what he's been forced to do in the past) and b, he's got a whole damn family, a mission, and a purpose beyond anything the Commission could give him. It's damned unprofessional, is what it is.

Hazel finds himself respecting this.

Hazel finds himself in a lot of unexpected places, the next few days.


	17. Q is for Question

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Why superheroes?"
> 
> Five looks up from the Handler's collection of artifacts, flexing the weight of the gun from his fingers. "What?"

"Why superheroes?"

Five looks up from the Handler's collection of artifacts, flexing the weight of the gun from his fingers. "What?"

She tilts her head at him, raises perfectly penciled eyebrows. "Your father-" If she sees Five wince at the word, she doesn't let on- "He saw that the end of the world was coming. He may even have known how. But why on Earth did Reginald Hargreeves think that the best way to avert whatever it was was six extremely traumatised adults?"

Five feels his shoulders, already pretty tense, stiffen further at the words. She's not exactly _wrong,_ per se, in fact, Five had expressed similar sentiments himself to Dolores (usually when he'd been drinking). But it's one thing to carry those opinions yourself, and quite another to hear a woman you regard as, in not an enemy, then a very uneasy ally, voice them. He gnaws on the inside of his lip, a teenaged habit that seems to have crept back with this body, and breaths out, hard, letting the Handler see his frustration at the question.

"There are five of us, actually."

"Oh, yes." The Handler seems blissfully unmoved by Five's correction. "Ben, wasn't it? I suppose he factored in a few deaths. But that supports my original point. If he'd done some more research, maybe built up some kind of technological expertise, or used that inventing power of his to better everyday life..." She shrugs. "Why not save the world by improving it?"

This actually makes Five laugh, though there's no humour in it. 'You never met him, then."

"You know I haven't." The Handler brushes an invisible speck of dust from her black satin skirt. "What's your theory, anyway? Why the superheroes?"

She's not going to stop needling him until he replies, is she? Five closes his eyes, briefly, then opens them again.

"Ir's obvious, actually." He turns to look at her, fingers still flexing, over and again, into fists. "He didn't want a way to save the world that he couldn't control."


	18. R is for Robot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grace loves all of her children equally.
> 
> She has to. She was programmed that way.

Grace loves all of her children equally.

She has to. She was programmed that way.

Of course, Diego is the sweetest to her. And Vanya is.... difficult. But Grace loves all her children with every artificial neuron she has. When Five disappears, it breaks her heart. She sets a place for him at the dinner table for a month afterwards. She only stops because Pogo reprograms her (he will do the same when Ben dies).

Grace cannot hate Reginald for it. It is physically impossible for her to do so. But every day she lays out that place, she turns her head ever so slightly to watch for his reaction.

She has been programmed to love her children. She was programmed to be loyal to Reginald.

But she has not been programmed to love him, too.


	19. S is for Superhero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five finds the lunchbox somewhere around year three. It's been through hell, much like he has, but the cartoon faces of himself and his siblings still smile at him from the scratched up tin lid. The first thing Five does with the damn thing is drop-kick it over the nearest pile of rocks (he thinks it used to be a hot dog stand. Or a public toilet. It's hard to tell.). However, after he spends a good twenty seconds losing a staring match with Dolores, he scrambles back to pick it up and runs his sleeve over the dulled paint, cleaning the dirt that's covered his brothers and sister.

Five finds the lunchbox somewhere around year three. It's been through hell, much like he has, but the cartoon faces of himself and his siblings still smile at him from the scratched up tin lid. The first thing Five does with the damn thing is drop-kick it over the nearest pile of rocks (he thinks it used to be a hot dog stand. Or a public toilet. It's hard to tell.). However, after he spends a good twenty seconds losing a staring match with Dolores, he scrambles back to pick it up and runs his sleeve over the dulled paint, cleaning the dirt that's covered his brothers and sister.

"What do you mean, what am I gonna do with it?" He turns to look at Dolores. 'We always need stuff to keep junk in out here." A pause. "I'm not being sentimental."

Five waits a minute, cocks his head to the side, and lets out his first, wild, bark of laughter in three years.

"No, I'm not crazy either." 

He squints at himself, the comic-book version, the one that would never have gotten himself stuck in a ruined future with no real hope of getting back. He feels something inside him. It's weird.

It kinda feels like hope.

Putting the box on his cart, he starts dragging it again, onward to where he hopes to make camp. Five is going to survive. He's going to work out a way home. He's going to save his family.

He's going to be a god damn super hero.


	20. T is for Team

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, at the end, the Hargreeves siblings join hands.

Finally, at the end, the Hargreeves siblings join hands.

The world slides away.

Five finds that he has missed this, the feeling of his brothers and sisters so close, so _united_ in purpose. He hasn't felt this since their days at the Academy, when they were all, essentially, banded together in a bid to survive the curse inflicted on them by their father: you will be super heroes, and you will save the world. Those bonds, he thought, had long since dissolved or, in Five's case, were suddenly and abruptly severed by twenty years of distance and thirty of waiting. He takes a moment, inbetween the giddy, painful rush of calculating their jump through time, to smile. To enjoy it. 

The emotion is, however, tinged by guilt, and by sorrow.

Sorrow, because one set of hands is, as always, missing. Vanya is unconscious in Luther's arms, and Five doesn't know, really, if she's alive or if that final apocalyptic release of her power has killed her. She looks exhausted. Vanya has _always_ looked exhausted. 

Guilt, because finally, at the end, Five sees what was hindering his efforts for so long. Why he failed, for the third time, to save his family.

Finally, at the end, Five realizes that he is part of a team, and always has been.


	21. U is for Umbrella

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It isn't even a word anymore- not to Five, and not to his siblings. It's a brand, or a secret sign, a stain on the skin that belies the trauma beneath.

He has this habit- they all do, except, of course, for Vanya- of rubbing his umbrella tattoo when he's unsure. Five doesn't know why they do this, not really. Maybe at the beginning, it was simply soothing. The process hurt badly enough, all the more for it being unexpected. Dad had called them down into the foyer one morning, slightly before training, and there was the chair, the gun, the antiseptic-plastic smell Mom had when she'd scrubbed down for a medical procedure. 

Five remembers that Four had asked 'tracking chips?' in this incredulous. almost hopeful voice, and that One had elbowed him in the ribs.

He remembers the pain, too, and that weird feeling of betrayal as the ink seeped under his skin. Five doesn't really cry, not often, but that day had him blinking tears back all the same, just like the rest of them. Luther had had to hug Alison one-handed, his arm held awkwardly away from her body to avoid the new scar.

Their bodies belonged to Hargreeves, now. He'd stamped them with his logo, like they were another piece of merchandise from his goddamn company, or prize cattle he didn't want to lose. Blazers could be lost, ties dropped on the street- this little mark was forever. The idea of it made him ill. Or maybe that was the smell again. Five isn't sure, any more. Anyway, it's there, and every now and again, he touches it. Even Luther rubs the place on his coat where the umbrella lies under hair and fabric, Five has seen him do it. Has wondered, even, if the tattoo survived the procedure. 

He hopes it didn't. It would be too much for Luther to be marked twice.

(Every so often, he sees Vanya's fingers twitch. In this she is, as always, a half-formed echo of her siblings. They all pretended not to notice when she drew the umbrella on their own arm. But they all shared that same stab of disgust at her need. That was, in the end, why they didn't like her, though none of them were cruel enough to say it. She wanted what they had, never understanding how willing any of them would have been to tear this mark off their skin and give it to her)


	22. V is for Vanya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So.
> 
> Vanya.

Vanya is, perhaps, the sharpest regret of Five's life. She just edges out past Dolores and Mom over the fact that she's real, dingy and shrunken in on herself enough that the first time Five sees her as an adult (he never found her body in the future, and he never thought to ask why) he has to suppress a hiss of shock. She looks, more than any of them, tired.

All at once, he regrets the childish cruelty, the envy that the other kids had shared in the moments she had her special training with Dad. God, they'd been so jealous of her. All of them, at one point or another. The normal one. The one who didn't have to risk her life. Free to become ordinary, and yet she'd chosen to do nothing with that gift except mope around the house and play her violin. Oh, he'd hidden it, because he knew it was wrong- because deep down, they all loved each other, or at least knew that there were only six other kids on the world who understood this particular hell they were in, and they had to look out for each other. It didn't make her obvious, naked envy any easier to bear.

He should have been kinder to her.

They all should have.

Five wants to tell her, when he goes to her apartment, that he'd missed her playing. The shadow of her presence. They way she watched out for him, even up to the day he disappeared.

He should have told her, before it was too late, before her long-buried power ripped the world apart:

Of all of his siblings, Five had missed Vanya the most.


	23. W is for Winter, Wishing, Waiting and Witness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are still seasons, even at the end of the world. They're strange, but they exist, and Five is shocked by the relief that he feels as the planet turns its shattered body away from the sun. It's the same way he feels when he spots his first cockroach, a sick kind of familiarity, a sweetness in not being the only being left alive to witness the end of everything.

There are still seasons, even at the end of the world. They're strange, but they exist, and Five is shocked by the relief that he feels as the planet turns its shattered body away from the sun. It's the same way he feels when he spots his first cockroach, a sick kind of familiarity, a sweetness in not being the only being left alive to witness the end of everything.

Or is he? Five has this debate with Dolores. She feels he's being arrogant, to assume he's the only thing left drawing breath. Of course there are other living things out there, maybe even people, certainly wildlife of some form or another left up in the mountains and the far reaches of the world. Five thinks he hears a bird, once. It's too faint and far away to be anything concrete, but he treasures the sound anyway, the same way he picks up half-burned books from the rubble of libraries and schoolrooms. Like them the memory of it becomes worn with use, faded like the sun-bleached photographs tacked to walls in the shells of the empty buildings they shelter in, as the world grows colder.

It was probably wishful thinking, anyway. Five knows, somehow, that he's the only one left. If his siblings couldn't survive what killed the world, why should anything else? There may well be a cycle of spring to summer to autumn to winter and back again, but once the initial relief has faded it's just another thing mocking him for his failure. Marking how long passes while Five is waiting for a solution to his stranding to drop, unexpected, into his head.

He waits for twenty winters, or thereabouts. Seasons last longer than they should, after a time. Whatever broke the world is making it sick, and Five isn't sure, any more, of how long he has. Either he'll die, or the planet will, and maybe that's the point of his being here after all, not a hero but a witness. Five can feel this season's cold gnawing at his bones. He isn't young, not any more.

Five Hargreeves is running out of time, if he ever had any to begin with. Slowly, he begins the walk back to the Academy. If he is going to die, he wants to die next to his siblings, where he was supposed to, all those years ago.

It is two days after this conclusion, give or take, that the Handler shows up.


	24. X is for X-Men

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In another world, more equipped for them, maybe they'd have done better.

Five can't help himself– the moment he's alone with Diego, he has to ask.

'What's your superhero name, then?" He doesn't mean for it to sound _quite_ so condescending, but he suspects any way he asks it would cause Diego to bristle slightly. This is clearly a sore subject, but then again Diego should have prepared himself for questions like this when he chose to keep dressing up in a mask and combat gear after he no longer had to.

"Number Two." 

Five doesn't even laugh, he just raises an eyebrow at Diego and is pleased to find that even on a thirteen year old face, it works. The older man sets his jaw in a movement that doubles down on the discomfort he's obviously feeling.

"The Kraken." 

This time, Five really does laugh. Just a tiny bit. "You don't even have sea powers, Diego."

"It was _metaphorical,_ oh my god." Number Two rolls his eyes. "I can't run around calling myself Knife Guy, can I? There's no poetry in your soul, Five."

"It's still a shit superhero name." Five says, with the calm authority of someone who's called himself by a number since he was old enough to speak. "You know, in the Commission they theorised that there were other worlds that had superpowered people just like us? Whole societies, schools of them. And yet, I doubt that a single one of them had a dumber name than you did, Diego."

The other man reaches oiut to give him a friendly push, then stops. The disparity between their heights and strength is probably too much. "Yeah well, I doubt any of them are as big assholes as you are."

Five shrugs. 'Would be nice though, right? To be somewhere equipped for us."


	25. Y is for Youth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A List Of Things I Hate About Being Thirteen, by Number Five

A List Of Things I Hate About Being Young Again, by Number Five

1\. Not tall enough to properly glare at people

2\. My voice is going to break AGAIN and this time there will be people around to HEAR IT

3\. Guns wrong size

4\. Klaus asked if I could dab

5\. I don't really see what a species of fish has to do with anything, _Klaus_

6\. Oh god I'm gonna get zits again

7\. It's not that I'm vain it's just that again there's people around and one nice thing about having puberty in the apocalypse is that all your embarrassing moments happen alone and- 

8\. Am I actually _missing_ the _apocalypse_

9\. Missing the apocalypse

10\. Luther called me 'kid'

11\. Luther apologised for calling me 'kid' and he did it out of _pity_

12\. My new contemporaries all seem to be obsessed with weird dances

13\. What is a Fortnite

14\. Faking interest in Fortnite

15\. Ties as everyday attire draw more comment _for some reason_

16\. Still tired

17\. God, still really, really tired.


	26. Z is for Zeal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this, as in most things, he is his father's son.

It takes Diego far too long to realise, but as he sits across from his brother at the dusty bar that, to his knowledge, has never been used until today, it suddenly occurs to him that Five is the best heir that Reginald Hargreeves could have asked for. 

The thought is like an actual, physical blow: he blinks, looks over at the boy (he needs to stop thinking of him like that, but honestly, until Five opens his mouth it's really difficult to remember that the kid sitting with a margarita in hand is actually fifty-three years old). It'd all there. The absolute conviction that he's going to save the world. The dogged persual of a goal that it'll cost him everything to achieve, That weird, superior detachment that had almost cost them everything, though Diego isn't going to be the one to tell him. Dad never liked to be told his mistakes either.

There's even the same way of standing, slightly stiff, that dad had, and Diego wonders if he'll age into that way of holding his body, too. The idea makes him shudder involuntarily, a movement that Five catches out of the corner of his eye.

He turns, gives Diego a quizzical tilt of the head.

"What?" 

Diego shakes some broken glass out of his hair.

"Nothing. Just thinking about the past, is all."


End file.
